MoEDAL - the LHC experiment designed to search for highly ionising avatars of new physics, such as magnetic monopoles or massive pseudo-stable charged particles - has collected data from p-p and Pb-Pb collisions at high energy. A unique feature of the experiment is its membership, which includes a high school.
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Last week I attended the annual LHC performance workshop in Chamonix. This meeting is an essential part of the CERN calendar, allowing colleagues from the accelerator community, along with representatives of the experiments and of other sectors and departments, to take stock of the accelerators’ performance in the year gone by, and set the direction for the year to come.
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As we explained in the last edition of the Bulletin (see here), the winter technical stop (otherwise known as the YETS – Year-End Technical Stop) is setting a huge number of experts to work on all of the Laboratory’s accelerators. For the time being, the various maintenance and improvement activities are all on schedule.
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The LHC Performance Workshop took place in Chamonix between Tuesday, 25 and Thursday, 28 January. The programme included a review of the machine’s performance in 2015, a forward look at Run 2, and discussion of the status of the LHC injectors upgrade (LIU) and HL-LHC projects. The final session was dedicated to the 2019-2020 long shutdown (LS2).
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Thirty-five Master's students in the fields of business, design and engineering participated in an intensive five-day project-based introduction to programming and advanced electronics. The goal of the initiative was to build a fully functional prototype robot able to communicate and show at least four basic human emotions.
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On Wednesday, 20 January 2016, Her Excellency Dr Dalia Grybauskaitė, President of the Republic of Lithuania, visited CERN. The Lithuanian delegation had a busy morning, visiting several of CERN’s facilities.
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As mentioned in the previous issue of the Bulletin (see here), the accelerators are currently undergoing maintenance as part of the year-end technical stop (YETS). Hundreds of people are working simultaneously on different machines, and many of them need to be trained in order to work safely underground. From a Safety Training point of view, this has resulted in a significant increase in training requests, most of them at the last minute, which are now being handled – but not without difficulties.
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Computer security can be handled in one of two ways: in secrecy, behind a black curtain; or out in the open, subject to scrutiny and with full transparency. We believe that the latter is the only right way for CERN, and have always put that belief into practice. In keeping with this spirit, here is a reminder of how we monitor (your) CERN activities in order to guarantee timely responses to computer security incidents.
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Are you able to assign tasks to your staff and then let them get on with them… or do you tend to hover over them to check on their progress? Observing and controlling supervisees too closely can be counterproductive, as it is often perceived as micromanagement and results in stifling employee decision-making, leaving them with the feeling that their manager does not trust them.
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Our friend and colleague Pierre is no longer with us. In corridors, around meeting tables, at coffee places, we gather and talk about him, about how great it was to have met him, and what a special person he was.
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